Among Patrick Kenzie’s distinctions, he may be the first private eye in recent American crime fiction to admit his business is slipping away in the recession.

Kenzie, along with his sometime girlfriend and sleuthing partner Angie Gennaro, appeared in five novels written between 1994 and 1999 by the Boston crime novelist Dennis Lehane. Then Lehane shelved the intrepid couple for 11 years, not returning to them until his new novel Moonlight Mile, in which Kenzie complains that his PI operation is cratering along with the rest of the economy.

Lehane was hardly slacking off during his long break from the Kenzie-Gennaro series. In that period, he wrote Mystic River, an epic about good and evil, more of the latter than the former, among characters in a working-class Boston neighbourhood. The novel was wonderfully absorbing, though not as powerful as Clint Eastwood’s movie version.

Next came Shutter Island, dismally spooky both as a novel and a Martin Scorsese film. It was followed by The Given Day, a novel about the Boston Police strike of 1919, which nobody seems to have read. Along the way, Lehane also managed to squeeze in the scripts for three episodes of the nonpareil HBO series, The Wire. This is a credential that’ll get any writer through the door for the rest of his career.

With Moonlight Mile, we find Kenzie and Gennaro in lives that have changed dramatically over the last decade. The pair have married, bought a house and had a child. Their girl is named Gabriella, now 4 and so relentlessly adorable that the reader soon develops profound wishes that her parents would lock the kid in her bedroom until the book ends.

Gennaro has gone back to college, taking her masters in applied sociology and aiming ultimately to teach classes for disadvantaged kids. With Gennaro out of the private detecting game — though she doesn’t hesitate to involve herself in Moonlight Mile’s intrigue — Kenzie is the only family member bringing home paycheques. They are, as it happens, few and far between.

“Look,” Kenzie tells a client he turns away because her case, while just, sounds non-remunerative, “I’m hurting just as bad as anyone in this economy.”

Nevertheless, Kenzie agrees to make an exception and work on a non-paying kidnapping case. His motivation lies in guilt, an emotion that has its origins in an earlier Kenzie-Gennaro novel, Gone Baby Gone (1998). In that book’s fraught case, also a kidnapping, the client was a dead-broke single mother named Helene, who could fairly be described as dim-witted, self-absorbed, ethically challenged and a drunken drug addict. In sum, Helene was a totally unfit mother for her 4-year-old Amanda. It was Amanda who got kidnapped.

After a serpentine plot, filled with many bad guys, Kenzie discovered that the actual kidnappers were kindly folks intent only on raising Amanda far from her horrible mother. So how should Kenzie have wrapped up the case?

He might have tried WWSD, as in, What Would Spenser Do? Spenser, Kenzie’s fellow Boston PI, can’t speak for himself today, not since his creator, the prolific crime novelist Robert B. Parker, died in January 2010. But Spenser admirers know in their hearts that if Kenzie had consulted him on the long ago kidnapping case, Spenser would have found a way to spare the nice kidnappers, give dreadful Helene the brush and assure Amanda of a safe childhood.

That’s not what Kenzie did. Less wise than Spenser, he believed in the law as it is written. Kidnappers needed to be punished. So the kindly folks went to prison and Amanda was returned to her feckless mother.

Now, a dozen years later in Moonlight Mile, Amanda has once again gone missing, possibly kidnapped, and Kenzie is back on the hunt for the girl he found once before. In the intervening years, Helene has become, if anything, less caring. Amanda, on the other hand, seems to have flourished.

Fanatically self-motivated, Amanda has won admission to a prestigious high school, scored top marks, kept on the straight and narrow and generally made herself into the most precociously sophisticated 16-year-old since Justin Bieber. Well, okay, maybe not him, but some preternaturally successful kid.

So who snatched her? And why?

Kenzie’s search takes him along the winding and sometimes infuriating path that is the usual in all Lehane books. Nothing is what it seems, and everything comes with violence. Kenzie’s life is often in jeopardy, and Gennaro is on the scene to serve as his occasional rescuer and reliable conscience.

This is familiar Lehane stuff. Two things are new. His writing, always shiny and relaxed, is less windy than usual, and he gives the ending a pleasingly unexpected twist.

And what about Kenzie’s financial struggles? Is he going to come up with a way to pay the mortgage and invest in the future education of his irritating little darling? In the book’s last chapter, he produces a plan that will assure the family’s security.

Sad to say, it’s not a solution that Spenser would have endorsed.

Jack Batten is a Toronto author and freelance writer. His Whodunit appears every two weeks.

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